Category Archives: Social Recruiting

New Recruiting Vendor – Intomi

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One of the most unique Recruiting vendors I saw when I was at HR Tech a few weeks back was a company out France.  The name of the company is Intomi – pronounced – “In-To-Me” and they’ve come up with a product that I dare say might change Corporate Recruiting as we know it, and when I say they’ve come up with something no one else has – believe me – NO One is selling this product!

Think about what is the one thing that Corporate recruiting is missing – what is it?

No, it’s not sourcing tools – they’ve got plenty of those.

No, it’s not screening tools – that market is flooded.

No, it’s not ATS’s, or CRM’s, or branding – and you’re not going to guess this because their product is unlike anything that has ever been scene in corporate recruiting.

What Intomi does is quite simple, which makes it even that more powerful.  That’s really what every recruiting and HR vendor should be striving for – designing a product so simple that it needs no explanation – just pick it up or turn it on – and go.  Simple is difficult to do – Intomi gets this!  I’m sure it was the simplicity of their design that first drew me into their product, but it was the functionality that kept me looking at it.

In 20 years of being in the talent/HR space I’ve never seen a product that had such an immediate impact to the amount of talent that was brought into our organization, and was so cost effective at the same time.  When job boards first came out 20+ years ago – that was a big deal – and over the past 10 years social tools have really changed the game – but all of these things had one fundamental flaw – Intomi changes all of that – it eliminates the one struggle that corporate recruiting still has.

Intomi does one thing and one thing only – Intomi will immediately separate you from your competition – as you can tell I’m a huge fan!  So, what is this super simple, super powerful solution to all of your recruiting problems?

Intome forces your recruiters to physically pick up the phone and dial the number of a candidate – and won’t allow the recruiter to hang up the phone until they say at least one word. Freaking Brilliant!   This will be HR Tech’s 2013 Award winner for sure!   How does Intome do this?  Glad you asked.  They use something called metrics – which actually tracks the number of calls a recruiter makes, how long they spent on the phone and how many qualified screened candidate profiles they send on to hiring managers.  If those metrics aren’t met, the recruiter is then coached and if they are continually not met, Intome will fire them for you!  I’m just really in love with this product!

I’m not their sales person – but if you want more information on this product, then you have no idea what you’re doing in recruiting.

 

Talent is a Zero Sum Game

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There is a mathematical concept called Zero-Sum, what is says is basically where one person, organization, etc. will gain, there is an equal loss by another person, organization, etc. of that exact same amount.   An example might be market share of a corporation – if GM has 17% market share of U.S. car buyers, and it gains 1%, to 18% total market share – the 1% came at the expense of their competition.  GM didn’t miraculously grow/build/birth 1% of new car buyers out of thin air. It’s a Zero-Sum game, their competition loses the exact same number of car buyers that GM gained – you rob Peter to pay Paul. 

Hiring Managers never get this!

Talent and HR Pros feel this all the time.  Hard to fill requisition, limited talent pool and the hiring managers makes you feel like you should be able to go down to the vending machine and just select C-3 and another Software Developer will fall down into your hands, ready to work! (by the way C-3 in my office is Peanut Butter M&M’s which seem to make everything better at almost any time of the day!) But it’s not that easy, right?!  Talent is a Zero-Sum game.  Now, I know my OD and Training friends will be all – “No it’s not! We can grow and build new Talent!”  Not really – not in the time I need it – which is NOW – or – YESTERDAY!  That’s my timing – it’s not 3 months or a year down the road.

That’s are main problem in Talent in 99.9% of organizations, are lack of organizational understanding of the simple concept of Zero-Sum.  If organizations really got this concept they would have robust, funded, succession planning programs that would be attempting to build future talent, to expand their internal talent pools,  but we don’t.  Less than 1% of organizations in the world really fund succession the way it needs to be funded if you want to be self sufficient in terms of talent.  Organizationally, you’re paying either way – you either pay the money up front in terms of talent attraction, or you can pay it on the backside with retention and training – so why does almost every company choose the front side of this equation?  I think most choose the talent attraction spend because we (HR/Talent/OD) have done a horrible job of working with our finance teams to come up with a plan that shows our organization there’s a better way to spend our money.  We haven’t given our leadership a better option – so we/they continue to choose to do more of the same.

Some could argue that we are currently in a less than Zero-Sum game with our employee demographics.  We have more of our population reaching retirement age, than we have potential workforce reaching the age/education/experience to replace our leaving workforce.  But, even at zero – you still see the problem we are in, it’s never ending, it’s just how do you choose to play the game.  I like thinking about our HR/Talent problems in terms of mathematics, because it gives me the feeling there are actually solutions and it’s just a matter of building the solution/process.   I think most will argue that the solution is to do all of it in combination – some attraction, some succession, some training – which I agree with, but I think the percentages of your current combination need to change if you truly want to get off the treadmill.

 

Before The Rose Ceremony – Interviewing beyond Selection

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Join Dawn Burke and I for our October webinar (sponsored by the good folks at HireVue) – “Before the Rose Ceremony: How to Become an Employer of Choice Through Your Interview Process”, where we’ll explore the following and compare it to the meat show on the Bachelor/Bachelorette:

  1. What pre-interview, pre-phone screen features subconsciously tell a candidate that you’re different from your competitors and help you plant the initial “why you want to work here” seed
  2. The 3 things that need to be present in your initial outreach to a candidate to prevent their BS meter from exploding (aka momentum killers).
  3. 5 Key Features of the live interview process at your company that sell your culture as a Great Place to Work – regardless if you hire the candidate or not.
  4. FOT’s Top 7 Interview Questions for uncovering great info and selling the candidate on your company as an employer of choice – they won’t even realize you’re doing it (and you’ll get great info as a result).
  5. SEND IN YOUR LESS ATTRACTIVE FRIENDS TO GIVE APPROVAL! (That’s FOT in this case.)  We’ll end with a simple audit process that you can use to determine if your interview process is contributing as much as it should toward your company being viewed as a destination of choice for candidates.

Join us for “Before the Rose Ceremony” and install a couple of the interview process features we discuss, and candidates will start to view you less as the Motel 6 and more like the Ritz.  Or wherever it is that feels like an upgrade from the Motel 6.  Maybe the LaQuinta?  The W?  You tell us.  The point is when you say no to people and they still love you, you’ve arrived – just like the bachelor or the bachelorette.  We think the way you interview candidates can help you accomplish that in the recruiting process.

**This program,ORG-PROGRAM-124798, has been approved for 1.00 (General ) recertification credit hours toward PHR, SPHR and GPHR recertification through the HR Certification Institute.

REGISTER TODAY

LinkedIn’s Talent Brand Index Could be Trouble!

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Ok, let’s be as transparent as possible:

1. I’m pissed at LinkedIn like a scorned girlfriend because they won’t let me buy their corporate version LinkedIn Recruiter (not that I need it – I know you can do x-ray searches or use a great product like Scavado for a fraction of the price and get the same info. – but it’s the racialist mentality of it all – “No, you can’t have it because your a bad staffing company and we only give it to good corporate recruiters) – see – scorned girlfriend.

2.  I use LinkedIn every day. Mostly to recruit employees from one company to another company, and someone pays me to do this.

3. I like using LinkedIn – solid U/I and a great recruiting tool, inexpensive.  (we call that a triple threat)

OK – On with the show!

Last week LinkedIn announced a new product at their annual Talent Connect conference, called Talent Brand Index or BrandConnect – or something like that – as you can see I wasn’t invited (which I’m actually not pissed about – I mean I’d like to go – but it’s not like the scorned girlfriend thing). Basically this is a tool/measure of how much your brand is engaged on the LinkedIn site – but it has a number of components baked into the algorithm that make this less than black and white.  I have 3 opinions of this announcement that range in 3 very different psychosis:

Pessimistic View (LinkedIn Haters)

Holy crap – this is just another way for LinkedIn to hold companies hostage over their brand!  Basically, the Talent Brand Index, if I want a higher score, forces me to encourage my employees to get on LinkedIn – the more employees I have on, the higher score I get.  Also, the more products I buy from LinkedIn, the higher my score.  I don’t want my employees to be on LinkedIn because my competition will be pimping them non-stop and I’m bound to lose some.  Plus, they keep using the words “Brand Engagement” that invariably will get confused by people as my “employee engagement” when it really has no correlation.

Optimistic View (LinkedIn Lovers)

This tool is great at showing me where I can increase my “engagement” of my brand within the product.  We trust our employees and want them to network professionally and share our brand with as many people as possible – it’s good for them, it’s good for us.  We believe we have a great place to work and increasing our brand engagement on LinkedIn will only help our recruiting efforts.  Plus, this new tool really, for the first time, gives us great insight to how people outside of our company feel and interact with our employment brand.  It’s great data!

Pragmatic View (The Middle)

If you have a “great” work environment and strong employment brand (let’s say 10% of companies) this is wonderful.  You have low turnover, high employee engagement – this will only help you recruit more folks – and more employees you have on won’t hurt you because they aren’t leaving you.  The other 90% of companies could see some impact from this – if they go out and encourage their employees to actively get on LinkedIn, in hopes of raising your Brand Index score. You have pockets that aren’t pretty and you’ll have folks that get picked off by your competition.  This will then cause you more work.  It’s not to say those people wouldn’t leave on their own – some will, regardless, but I don’t want to throw them a job fair in the lobby of our building. Reality check – most HR shops/companies don’t have the people, the money or the desire to really move the needle on increasing their “LinkedIn Brand Index” score – so this will be a non-issue for most.

Final thought –

I would like those companies who really think this is a great deal to do just 1 thing for me. Will you do that?  Today, go to your CIO and tell them you are going to have the entire Software Development team put their profiles up on LinkedIn – because you want to raise your Brand Index score.  Then let me know the results – if you still have a job, or are conscious.

 

Falling in Love with Your Job

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Do you know what it felt like the last time you fell in love?

I mean real love?

The kind of love where you talk 42 times per day, in between text and facebook messages and feel physical pain from being apart? Ok, maybe for some of you it’s been a while – you didn’t have the texts or Facebook!  But you remember those times when you really didn’t think about anything else, or even imagine not seeing the other person the next day, hell, the next hour. Falling “in” love is one of the best parts of love – it doesn’t last that long and you never get it back.

I hear people all the time say “I love my job” and I never use to pay much attention – in fact – I’ve said it myself.  The reality is – I don’t love my job – I mean I like it a whole lot – but I love my wife, I love my kids, I love Diet Mt. Dew at 7am on a Monday morning – the important things in life.  But my job?  I’m not sure about that one.  As an HR Pro I’m suppose to work to get my employees to “love” their jobs.  Love.

Let me go all Dr. Phil on you for a second – Do you know why most relationships fail? No, it’s not the cheating. No, it’s not the drugs and/or alcohol. No, it’s not money. No, it’s not that he stop caring. No, it’s not your parents. Ok, stop it – I’ll just tell you!  Relationships fail because expectations aren’t met.  Which seems logical knowing what we know about how people fall in love, and lose their minds.  Once that calms down – the real work begins.  So, if you expect love to be the love of the first 4-6 months of a relationship – you’re going to be disappointed a whole bunch – over and over.

Jobs aren’t much different.  You get a new job and it’s usually really good!  People listen to your opinion. You seem smarter – hell – you seem better looking (primarily because people are sick of looking at their older co-workers). Everything seems better in a new job.  Then you have your 1 year anniversary and you come to find out you’re just like the other idiots you’re working with.   This is when falling in love with your job really begins – when you know about all the stuff the company hid in the closet – the past employees they think are better and smarter than you, the good old days when they made more money, etc.  Now is when you have to put some work into making it work.

I see people all the time moving around to different employers and never seeming to be satisfied.  They’re searching – not for a better job, or a better company – they’re searching for that feeling that will last.  But it never will – without them working for it.

 

Off-shoring Your Recruiting

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If you haven’t been contacted by a recruiting off-shoring company yet, put yourself into a rare segment of Talent/HR Pros.  Almost daily I receive an email or phone call – from a U.S. phone number – telling me how I can save thousands of dollars by using their services to help us recruit for our open positions.  I always find this funny since my company is a third-party recruiting company.  So, basically, they are telling me that they can save me thousands of dollars from the thousands of dollars I tell my clients we are going to save them – sounds to good to be true!

But I’m also a sucker!  Yep, I took the bait!

Here’s the deal:

  • For about $1200/month you’ll get a “Full-time Recruiter” (the price might change a little based on how many you need, volume, etc. but that’s the ballpark)
  • This “Recruiter” works Monday through Friday from 8am to 5pm EST.
  • This “Recruiter” will have a U.S. based phone number.
  • You can have contact with this recruiter via phone or email – in fact it’s encouraged.
  • This “Recruiter” is actually based in India, in a call center environment.
  • This “Recruiter” has access to the major job boards and the internet and is trained at making a basic recruiting call.
  • You can get some guarantees on how many “candidates” presented, screened, etc.
  • The “Recruiter” has an email address from your company and presents themselves as working for your company.

Here’s my reality:

  • At $1200/month I had to try it – it seemed like a small investment for some education into this off-shoring recruiting world I keep hearing about.
  • The recruiter was pleasant, a bit hard to understand, and I felt wanted to do a good job.  It also sounds like they are sitting on the busiest street corner in Mumbai! (imagine giant call center with 500 folks all on the phone at the same time – with the windows open – sitting on Time Square – that’s the sound!)
  • They basically just call off of folks they find on job boards and/or an internal database of contacts which consist of H1B candidates that need sponsorship (we had them working on some IT openings to see what they came up with)
  • In 30 days of working a JAVA Developer opening, working for a U.S. client in the Denver Metro area with a competitive wage – this off-shoring recruiting company presented zero candidates that didn’t need sponsorship and only 1 candidate overall.
  • It wasn’t an easy opening – but that’s why I gave it to them to see how this person would do.
  • After the first 3 days I got a message and a call almost daily from the Recruiter and this person’s manager asking for more orders, even though they had yet to present one candidate.  This didn’t stop. We tried at the end to give a couple more IT openings we had, that I had my internal recruiters working on to see if they would come up with different candidates – and again we got a bunch of H1B candidates.

I don’t consider this to be a total failure – the experience let me know exactly what kind of orders that an off-shoring company could handle and do well with.  Those orders would most likely be ones where you have a healthy candidate base and just don’t have the internal capacity to go through the process of screening, or you have a staff that just has a hard time picking up the phone and calling potential candidates (stop laughing – that’s most corporate HR folks – or there wouldn’t be a multi-billion dollar recruiting industry).

Would I do it again?  Probably not, although the lure of a $1200/month recruiter is very enticing – especially one that isn’t afraid of the phones, but the reality of what I got doesn’t match up with what I paid.  Now – if I had to hire for a U.S. Call center and needed someone to plow through Monster and find 50 candidates a week for us to interview – maybe that might be the key to making this thing work.

$1200 education for myself.  You don’t have to get this same education – if you are seriously considering this – call me and I’ll tell you some better options for your $1200!

 

 

What Job Hunting is Not

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There is one thing I love to do each week – sit down on a Sunday morning, with most of the family still in bed, my youngest on the couch watching cartoons and me reading the Sunday paper.   It’s one of those small things in life I really like to do – my wife tells me it reminds her of her father – it probably reminds me of my father as well.  Diet Mt. Dew, Cinnamon Pop-tart and the Paper – the perfect Sunday morning.

This Sunday I actually read a column of a local writer that was really good – it was from the heart, you could tell his passion – it was about his own job search.  Job Hunting Leads to a State of Confusion – went through his most recent frustrating job search to find his current position he loves at the local paper.   It had been 20 years since he had to go through a job search, and he believed in what he had heard from the “experts” over the past 20 years on “how to get a job”.  What he found was the exact opposite – and what most of us in the profession have known all along.  You don’t get a job by having the best resume, or following the online submission process, or even answering every interview question the best – you get a job by making connections with people.  After all the science and all the technology – it still comes down to relationships and making a personal connection.

From the article:

Work skills did not translate to job-landing skills.

The concept seemed counter-intuitive to me. In fact, it went against what I thought I’d learned about job hunting in my news-gathering days. Then, history of punctuality, dependability and going the extra mile were immensely important. Writing and communication skills couldn’t be emphasized enough.

I’d written the tips many times. Now all I had to do was make a compelling case to potential employers. I couldn’t have been more off base…

My work history appeared secondary and the interview process came off as impersonal…

Interview panels seemed weirdly focused on themselves…

Interviewers seemed strangely uninterested in seeing my work…”

Sound familiar?  It’s what we put candidates through, it’s what we force our hiring managers to do – impersonal, weird, strange.

Job hunting, when you have to be hunting (i.e., I don’t have a job and need one), sucks!

Job hunting is not fun.

Job hunting is not exciting.

Job hunting is not life affirming.

As HR/Talent Pros we tend to forget this little fact.  The fact that the people we are interviewing and putting through our “process” are in the most stressful part of their life.  It’s hard to be your best, when you’re most stressed.  Less hoops and more helps are probably needed.  Something for me to think about the next time I’m interviewing someone.

 

3 Reasons Talent Communities are NOT the Future of Employment

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I know a lot of really smart, brilliant people who espouse that Talent Communities are the second coming of Christ, in regards to employment and recruiting.  Business Week even had a recent article where they called “Talent Hives” (I guess their version of “Talent Communities” – the future of employment – which means this concept is now hitting main stream and soon you’ll see June the HR Manager down at the local Tool & Die Shop trying to set up her talent community.  Here’s more from Business Week:

“These are communities of people interested in an employer (whether because they’re job hunting themselves, or just curious, or because they’re fans of the product or service the organization produces) and willing to be in two-way touch with that employer over time. (For the simplest example of a Talent Hive, think of a Facebook (FB) company page or a LinkedIn (LNKD) group). Talent Hives are popular because they’re easy to set up, and because the two-way and group communication makes it easy for companies to learn more about potential job applicants (including people who are currently working for their competitors) even when they don’t have open positions.”

Great theoretical concept.  But I think theory and practice don’t always align because the real world steps in an kicks it in and kicks them both to the curb.  Here’s 3 reasons I don’t see Talent Communities as the Future of Employment:

1. Reality – Talent Communities are established by you and ran by you (the HR/Recruitment Dept.) – that’s means you need to deliver content, sometimes unique, definitely engaging. Very few people, in HR worlds, have the skill/ability to do this.  You can shop this out, at a cost – a cost of not only money but also authenticity – there goes that community feel.  And, by the way, you’re doing this for a benefit you may, or may not, get in the future when you have an opening you believe you might have.  How many organizations are really going to do this long term? It’s a small percentage, congregated into smaller specialty industries – with really big budgets – to make it sustainable.

2. Logistics – Talent Communities assume “Talent” – that talented people you would want to hire will voluntarily want to join your content driven community and interact.  That’s a huge assumption! Gigantic!  First, you (yes, you – who else will do it) needs to go out and find the great talent that you someday want to work at your company and engage them to be apart of your community.  I don’t know about you – but 99.9% of the HR/Talent Pros I know don’t have the capacity to make this happen – either through time or skill.

3. WIFM (What’s In It For Me) – Talent Communities don’t deliver enough WIFM.  Talented people get this – they are fooled by your “Community” which isn’t really a community but a holding pen for potential future candidates and you have to know they know this. This means someone who ops into your community gets the deal – I want to work at your place – so I’m going to engage with you – and you will engage with me – and one day you’ll hire me – and you’ll use that number to justify how great Talent Communities are so I can keep this job as Talent Community Manager and justify my $50K+ salary.  How’s that work for you?

Let’s face it – I don’t know much – but I think I know a little about recruitment – and to me Talent Communities seem to be a lot of smoke and mirrors and well it’s easier/safer than just picking up the phone and finding/calling the talent you want (which is dirty and evil for some reason).  I know some folks have some great examples of Talent Communities working – good for them – I hope they keep working for them.  I guess this message goes out to the HR majority – it isn’t as easy as it might sound.  Before jumping in with both feet – make sure it’s right for you.

The Value of a Really Crappy Job

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As some of you may have realized from recent posts (Wanted: People Who Aren’t Stupid), I’ve been interviewing candidates recently for the position of Technical Recruiter working for my company HRU. I love interviewing because each time I interview I think I’ve discovered a better way to do it, or something new I should be looking for, and this most recent round of interviews is no different.  Like most HR/Talent Pros I’m always interested in quality work/co-op/internship experience – let’s face it, it’s been drilled into us – past performance/actions will predict future performance/actions.  So, we tend to get excited over seeing a candidate that has experience from a great company or competitor – we’re intrigued to know how the other side lives and our inquisitive nature begs us to dig in.

What I’ve found over the past 20 years of interviewing is that while I love talking to people that worked at really great companies – I hire more people that have worked at really bad companies.  You see, while you learn some really good stuff working for great companies – I think people actually learn more working for really crappy companies!  Working at a really great companies gives you an opportunity to work in “Utopia” – you get to see how things are suppose to work, how people are suppose to work together, how it a perfect world it all fits together.  The reality is – we don’t work Utopia (at least the majority of us) we work in organizations that are less than perfect, and some of us actually work in down right horrible companies. Those who work in horrible companies and survive – tend to better hires – they have battle scars and street smarts.

So, why everyone wants to get out of really bad companies (and I don’t blame them) there is actually a few things you learn from those experiences:

1. Leadership isn’t a necessity to run a profitable company. I’ve seen some very profitable companies that had really bad leadership – people always think they’ll leave those companies and they’ll fail – they don’t.  Conversely, I’ve worked for some companies that had great people leaders and failed.

2. Great people sometimes work a really crappy companies.  Don’t equate crappy company with crappy talent.  Sometimes you can find some real gems in the dump.

3. Hard work is relative.  I find people who work at really bad companies, tend to appreciate hard work better than those who work a really great companies with great balance.  If all you’ve every known is long hours and management that doesn’t care you have a family – seeing the other side gives you an appreciation that is immeasurable.

4. Not having the resources to do the job, doesn’t mean you can’t do the job. Working for a crappy company in a crappy job tends to make you more creative – because you probably won’t have what you need to do the job properly, so you find ways.

5. Long lasting peer relationships come through adversity.  You can make life-long work friends at a crappy job – who you’ll keep in contact and be able to leverage as you move on in your careers.  And here’s what each of you will think about the other: “That person can work in the shit!”  “That person is tough and get’s things done” “That person is someone I want on my team, when I get to build a team”

We all know the bad companies in our industries and markets.  Don’t discount candidates who have spent time with those companies – we were all at some point needing a job – a first experience, a shot at a promotion or more money, etc. and took a shot at a company we thought we could change or make a difference.  I love people who worked for bad companies, in bad jobs with bad management – because they wear it like a badge of honor!

2 Reasons Women Don’t Get Hired or Promoted

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The New York Times had an article recently regarding hiring practices and succession practices at Google – and G*d knows if Google is doing it – it must be important, and we must try and do the same thing. What I liked about this article was it didn’t necessarily look at practices and processes – it looked at data – and the data found that Google – like almost every other large company – does a crappy job hiring and promoting women. Shocking, I know, if you’re a man – we had no idea this was going on! In America of all places… Beyond the obvious though, Google was able to dig into the data and find out the whys and make some practical changes that I think most companies can implement – and that I totally agree with.  From the article:

“Google’s spreadsheets, for example, showed that some women who applied for jobs did not make it past the phone interview. The reason was that the women did not flaunt their achievements, so interviewers judged them unaccomplished.

Google now asks interviewers to report candidates’ answers in more detail. Google also found that women who turned down job offers had interviewed only with men. Now, a woman interviewing at Google will meet other women during the hiring process.

A result: More women are being hired.”

Here are two selection facts that impact both men and women:

1.  We like to surround ourselves with people who we like – which usually means in most cases people who are similar to ourselves

2. We tend not to want to brag about our accomplishments, but our society has made it more acceptable for men to brag.

This has a major impact to your selection – and most of you are doing nothing about it.  It’s very common that if you run simple demographics for your company – ANY COMPANY – you’ll see that the percentage of your female employees does not come close to the percentage of your female leadership.  Why is that?

Here are two things you can do to help make the playing field more level in your organization:

1. Have women interview women.  Sounds a bit sexist in a way – but if you want women to get hired into leadership positions you can’t have them going up against males being interviewed by males because the males will almost always feel more comfortable with another male candidate. Reality sucks, buy a helmet.

2. Ask specific questions regarding accomplishments and take detailed notes. Studies have found woman don’t get hired or promoted because they don’t “sell” or brag enough about their accomplishments giving their male counterparts a leg up – because the males making the hiring decisions now have “ammunition” to justify their decision to hire the male.

Let’s face it – Google is doing it – so now we all have to do it.  What would we do without best practices…(maybe innovate and create new better practices – but I digress…).